A couple days ago, I got hit with a virus - Alureon among others. No clue what went on there, as I’ve got anti-virus running, did not click any weird links, or anything like that. Nevertheless, I had it, and with the help of Malwarebytes, cleaned it off. I’ve had multiple clean scans since and no weird behavior, so I’m reasonable sure I cleaned it off OK.
Just today, I started to see some weird stuff, like file icons in some of my IDEs showing up with odd icons/colors. “Hmm” I think, “what’s going on with that?” and head over to an explorer window to see if that gives me any more clues.
Imagine my surprise to see that my D: drive is completely empty, especially since I’d just been working with files on my D: drive. WTF?
I look around some more. My backup drives - Q: and R: - both exhibit the same behavior.
chkdsk shows nothing wrong. The files are not hidden (I checked). They do not show up in the command prompt or if I open the root folder of any of the drives. However, if I open an explorer window and type in the path to something, they do show up. Like D:\ is empty. D:\Photos shows my photos, but none of my subfolders in the Photo folder.
Right clicking the drives and showing the properties show the drives with what I believe to be the correct amount of free/used space.
So… my files are there, I can access them, but they don’t show up in a directory listing. WTH is going on, and how do I fix it?
Whoa… wait, maybe they are hidden. I did an attrib -h . at the command prompt, but it didn’t seem to un-hide anything. “Show hidden folders” in the Explorer, however, does, and I’m working through unhiding them now.
Crazy weird. Is this something a virus might do? Hide all your files/folders?
At least I feel good being in such company as **ZipperJJ ** and RTFirefly. The damn thing scared the hell out of me when it first popped up because it looked like a hard drive failure. Then I booted into Safe mode and miraculously my hard drive was not failing. Boot back into normal mode and it’s failing again. :dubious:
I searched all over the web for answers on how to clean it off before looking at the dope, where I found the answer within 10 seconds. One Dope Rules them All.
I honestly think this is the only major virus I’ve ever actually gotten. At least, it’s the only one I remember. Occasionally my anti-virus pops up and tells me it found something but it gets cleaned off before it does any dirty work. This one… arggh… such a hassle.
Hello good people,
Athena and Zipper, do either of you have any idea of how Athena, (yourself), or ZipperZZ, (your friend), got hit by this nasty?
There are some nasties called ‘zero day viruses’, so-called because they appear too quickly for most of the big Anti-Virus companies to react to.
Athena, you sound from your post to be a bright person, please tell me what happened so I can try( and avoid it.
Other suggestions apologies if Grannies and sucking eggs come to mind: Disk re-imaging, last good condition, load a linux O/S puppy is nice, recover your file and re-install XP/Win 7.
I assume you’ve not been cursed with Vista.
Billy the Cat says Miaow, and happy new year.
Peter
and avoid it.